Cover

Contents

Introduction

Conventional thinking about Jewish history has pivoted around a number
of key dates, going from 70 CE with the destruction of the Temple
in Jerusalem by the Romans to 1492 and the expulsion from Spain. Most
commentators would agree that 1881 with the outbreak of the pogroms
in the Czarist empire, ...

Part I: Global Ties

1. Living Locally, Organizing Nationally, and Thinking Globally: The View from the United States

The 1929 volume of the American Jewish Yearbook included a lengthy
obituary for Louis Marshall, a constitutional lawyer and American Jewish
communal activist who died that year while attending a Zionist conference
in Lausanne, Switzerland. Marshall, decidedly not a Zionist, ...

2. Jewish Diplomacy at a Crossroads

Three personal ends and one institutional beginning that took place
within slightly more than a year of one another offer a way of understanding
Jewish diplomacy in the year 1929. Those events, when taken
together, symbolize the waning of one approach to a fundamental problem
of modern Jewish politics ...

3. The Stalinist “Great Break” in Yiddishland

The year 1929 marked the end of a five-year “romantic” period in Soviet
Jewish history. This period started around 1924, when the Soviet regime
began to deal much more seriously with issues related to Jews, while
previously the state and party apparatus responsible for Jewish affairs
was involved largely with testing its propaganda function. ...

4. Permanent Transit: Jewish Migration during the Interwar Period

On a night in late April 1929 Benjamin M. Day, commissioner of
immigration, attended a Passover Seder at Ellis Island, together with
150 people, many of them Jewish immigrants. According to the New
York Times, “he instructed all departments to lend every possible hand
in permitting the fullest enjoyment of the festival in true holiday fashion.”1 ...

5. Polish Jewry, American Jewish Immigrant Philanthropy, and the Crisis of 1929

It was a particularly cold morning on December 12, 1930, when thousands
lined up in front of the Bank of United States on Orchard Street
to withdraw their savings. Founded in 1913 by Jacob Marcus, the Bank
of United States stood as a celebrated symbol of Jewish economic success. ...

6. Jewish American Philanthropy and the Crisis of 1929: The Case of OZE-TOZ and the JDC

“It is very beautiful for Lord Rothschild, Sir Samuel Intone and other
Europeans to pass the buck to us,” wrote Louis Marshall to Joseph
Hyman. Marshall, the vice president of the Joint Distribution Committee
and chairman of the Agro-Joint, continued in this letter to Hyman,
the JDC’s vice chairman, ...

7. Territorialism and the ICOR “American Commission of Scientists and Experts” to the Soviet Far East

Most of the world remembers the year 1929 for the New York stockmarket
crash at the end of October, ushering in what became known
as the Great Depression. For American Jewish Communists, though,
there were other issues that same year perhaps more significant. ...

Part II: Local Stories

8. From Universal Values to Cultural Representations

1929 was a crucial year in the history of the Marxist movement in Eretz-Israel/Palestine. After a decade of stimulating circulation of Marxist
ideology and the establishment of local Communist parties that were
declared official branches of the world communist movement—the
Comintern—by 1929, ...

9. The Struggle over Yiddish in Postimmigrant America

In 1930, the first convention of the recently formed Yidishe kulturgezelshaft
(Yiddish Cultural Society) in New York provided the Yiddish
journalist Bentsien Goldberg—the son-in-law of Sholem Aleichem—an
opportunity to reflect on the differences between Yiddish culture in the
United States and in eastern Europe. ...

10. When the Local Trumps the Global: The Jewish World of São Paulo, Brazil, 1924–1940

I am not sure if 1929 was a particularly significant year for Jews in Brazil.
1930—perhaps? That year a golpe de estado brought Getúlio Vargas
to power, eventually leading to a protofascist dictatorship that had
a profound impact on both Jewish immigration and images of Jews,
both positive and negative. ...

Part III: Literature

11. Patterning a New Life: American Jewish Literature in 1929

The notion of delimiting the object of literary analysis to texts produced
in a specific year—in this case, American Jewish texts produced in
1929—might make a critic conceive a project in two ways. One might
tackle the project historically (or diachronically) in an attempt to determine
how the American Jewish literature of 1929 arose, ...

12. David Vogel: Married Life 1929

During the period of transition from Haskalah literature to the literature
of the so-called revival (1880 to 1920), Jewish intellectuals, many of
them writers, debated the future and nature of Hebrew literature, drawing
up prescriptive lists of what the literature should or should not do. ...

13. Radical Conservatism: Bashevis’s Dismissal of Modernism

Warsaw in 1929, the publishing house of Boris Kletskin brought out a
miscellany titled Amol in a yoyvl. Bearing the subtitle zamlbukh far beletristik,
this volume contained a selection of poetry and prose by some
of the leading Yiddish writers of the day, including Kadia Molodowsky,
Rokhl Korn, Meylekh Ravitsh, and Yehoshue Perle. ...

1929 was the last year when texts that openly challenged the proletarian
aesthetics could still appear in the Soviet Union, but this was also a year
when a series of high-profile ideological campaigns against prominent
writers made it clear that this kind of writing would not be tolerated
any longer. ...

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